Monday morning roundup

The world has gotten better for more people since I last saw graphics like these, at least in the way of access to food, water, and electricity. The one on language (at the full site) is interesting, too.

A new book on Alzheimer's caregivers.

Marion Cory's column on her self-defined androgyny makes me crazy. She defines vulnerability and manners (saying "please" and "excuse me") as feminine, and strength as masculine, and then goes on about how she chooses strength, and therefore doesn't feel at home in the women's locker room. Mind you, she's not actually transsexual; just nonconforming to her own constructs of gender traits. Does she not realize that she's just confining other, less original (in her view) people to gender stereotypes?

Krugman, writing about Comcast, reminds us that monopoly rarely breeds innovation and service.

Reading about (declining) British pub culture brings back surprisingly strong memories.

I will never look at corkscrews the same way again.

Really, guys? (I'm, not for the first time, reminded of why I'm not on Facebook).

Francine Prose on why she is back to writing bad reviews

It depresses me to see talented writers figuring out they can phone it in, and that no one will know the difference. I’m annoyed by gossip masquerading as biography, by egomaniacal boasting and name-dropping passing as memoir. It irks me to see characters who are compendiums of clichés. I can’t explain precisely why a sentence like “His eyes were as black as night” should feel like an insult, but it does. It’s almost like being lied to.

With that, I'm glad to be advised not to read Mitchell Stephens' new book on atheism, even though the advising column itself is ever so tiresome (I expect no less from Adam Gopnik, who has been guilty of sentences far worse than "his eyes were as black as night." He doesn't do that in this review, but he does drown a few interesting ideas in his pompous, self-indulgent, wordy style.

But let's end on a positive note, or a book that one would want to read: Nancy Ectoff's "Survival of the Prettiest." There was little new information in the excerpts here, but old news is still interesting from a different angle. We've long known--or we've long had reason to know--that no one else (except our mothers, if yours is anything like mine) notices the minor flaws and fluctuations in our appearance that can obsess us. It is interesting that the writer makes a distinction between beauty--the raw, human experience--and "fashion," or the "manufactured stand-ins" for beauty that the "beauty" industry uses to get people to buy things. I'd heard before about Eleanor Roosevelt; this is not in that column but maybe there's more about it in the book--my understanding is that her parents, who were both known as beautiful people, relentlessly mocked her for her perceived lack of beauty--so I wonder how much of her regrets have to do with her upbringing about beauty rather than the thing itself. But it does go to show that no amount of substance--we're talking about the woman who pioneered international human rights law--will displace the very human compulsion for beauty. It reminds me of two other distinguished regretters: Nora Ephron, who suggested she'd have been a different person had she been well-endowed (PDF) and Serge Gainsburg, who apparently said, among other things on the matter fo beauty, that he has too great an appreciation for beauty to not be bothered by his own appearance.

And yes, Russian women just don't see what all the fuss is about.